by RICK DANLEY // September 22, 2016
There’s a certain type of American male for whom the Hollywood Western acts upon his system like a comfort food. It’s consolingly basic, composed of the same ingredients every time, and is — aside from a handful of artful exceptions — relatively easy to digest.
Looking across the Atlantic in the post-war years, Andre Bazin, the godfather of French movie criticism, praised the Western as “the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself” and whose scripts, because of their archetypal simplicity, “have often been a subject for parody.”
In this opinion, he might have been anticipating at least one facet of the talk Scott Eyman will deliver this Saturday at the 23rd annual Buster Keaton Celebration. Eyman, one of the country’s top film scholars, will discuss — in “Buster Keaton and the Landscape of the West” — the silent comedian’s place in the history of that most solemn of genres.
And while Bazin, in his airless, continental way, is a useful interpreter of the genre, Eyman is a more entertaining guide:
“Every comedian takes a run at the Western at some point,” explained Eyman in a recent phone conversation. “Martin and Lewis did it, Bob Hope did it, Abbot and Costello did it — and that’s because the genre is so imprinted on the American subconscious. We all know the rhythms of the Western, we all know the tropes of the Western, and so you start off on second base. You don’t have to spend a lot of time outlining narrative. You can just do funny variations on things that have always been heretofore played straight.”
In 1918, Roscoe Arbuckle directed and starred in a short called “Out West,” which features a young Buster Keaton, his stoic persona still largely unformed.
“What’s striking about it is how every Western cliché is already present at that time, in 1918. The Western had only been around for about 15 years, if you date it from “The Great Train Robbery” of 1903. So it’s a young genre at that point, by any standard. But it’s as if it was already there on our collective imagination by 1918, like erased memory or something. It was a picturization of something we already knew.
“And so here is the really interesting thing. They’re satirizing something that was in its infancy. All the clichés are already present: the skyline shot, the John Ford shot, the hero who gets thrown off the train in the middle of nowhere, the dancehall girls, the evil guy that runs the saloon. You know, they were pumping this shit out for 50 more years, into the ‘60s and ‘70s, with varying degrees of realism or poetry or whatever. But it was all stock by 1918, that is the amazing thing.”
Eyman, who’s written about John Ford and John Wayne, and who provided the commentary for the DVD release of “Stagecoach,” is ideally placed to discuss the cinematic history of the Western. And he doesn’t mind being asked about it. Not really.
“I’ve written a lot of books other than about John Ford and John Wayne,” Eyman said. “But that’s all anybody ever asks me about. I don’t mind. It’s like Tony Bennett. He sang ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ whether he was in the mood or not. Because people expected it. I guess people expect me to talk about Westerns. But, hey — I guess I’m happy to be asked about anything.”
(For the record, among his many books, he’s written an excellent biography of Louis B. Mayer and another of the great Ernst Lubitsch.)
KEATON’S relationship to the Western — in films like “Out West” and “Go West,” primarily — is, as Eyman explains, essentially parodic. The genre, with its legible tropes and standard plots, served as a ready canvas upon which Keaton was able to apply his comic hyperbole.
Eyman looks again at “Out West”: “Here, Keaton plays the heavy, the guy who runs the saloon. Of course, he’s evil and he shoots people, which is pretty standard for guys who run saloons in Westerns. But, this time, there’s a trapdoor in the middle of the saloon. Keaton just opens the door and flips the bodies in. He’s doing a volume business, in corpses.
“So, the idea of the heavy running a saloon is normal. But you exaggerate it by bumping off someone a couple times a week, to where he needs this trapdoor into the basement where he can dump the bodies. There’s not really a great deal of difference between the two — it’s just that the role of the comedian is to exaggerate.”
But it’s not just the machinations of plot that get rephrased with each new Western. Specific desert locations — whether it’s Monument Valley during the John Ford years, or Marfa, Texas, today — receive repeat airings.
For example, Eyman suspects that “Out West” was shot, at least in part, in California’s Red Rock Canyon, a frequent backdrop for Hollywood Westerns — including, most famously, William Wyler’s mirthless epic “The Big Country” (1958).
“They’re using the same location 40 years later,” reflects Eyman. “It’s the exact same place — even the actual plot points in the movies are not radically different. But are you going to play it straight or are you playing it for laughs? See, it’s always just a question of inflection.”
AND YET it was Keaton’s great art to know when to exaggerate, what to exaggerate, and by how much. Toward the end of his life, this master of cinema was pressed by an interviewer to reflect on the mysteries of his talent.
“The thing,” said Keaton, finally, “is to not be ridiculous. The one mistake the Marx Brothers ever make is that they’re sometimes ridiculous.”
But what does it mean for Keaton, who spent a career perfecting ever more inventive ways of going ass over teakettle, to run away from the theatre of the ridiculous?
“I know what he’s talking about,” said Eyman. “He’s talking about reality. I mean, you wouldn’t be stunned to see someone like Charlie Chaplin on the street. You wouldn’t be stunned to see Buster Keaton on the street. But there’s no equivalent in the Marx Brothers. You’re not going to see Harpo or Chico on the street. They’re not real. Chaplin and Keaton, and for that matter Harold Lloyd, always represented a kind of psychological and emotional reality, whereas the Marx Brothers are crazy comics, they’re anything-for-a-laugh comics. It’s wonderful, but it’s also surreal. Keaton preferred his surreality in a different tone, at a lower volume.”
It’s true. Keaton, with his lugubrious charm and mournful eyes, managed his antics on a more human scale. He rejected the frenetic gesturing of the Marx Brothers, winning his audiences, instead, through the quiet connotations of his face. A face, James Agee wrote in 1949, that ranks almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype and that carries with it, behind the composed gaze, a whisper of melancholy. Keaton’s gift is that he stood in for the moviegoer, and his real art was in the demonstration that, amid the ceaseless tumult of life, if complete triumph isn’t in your cards, it’s at least in you to exhibit, as another critic has written, the “casual reluctance to be crushed.”
